If Shakespeare…

Strange the things you end up doing.

In the past I have to admit that I’ve been somewhat half-hearted in my approach to getting published. However, this year, in a mood of “make or break”, I decided to adopt a more structured approach. Phase one of this involves building up some kind of attention-grabbing CV, and this in turn involves entering as many writing competitions as possible.

If you put something like “writing competition 2007″ into Google, it’s quite surprising how many there are, ranging from the mighty Bridport down to smaller fare such as the Bournemouth Literary Festival. On closer inspection, however, Bournemouth seemed a little different from the rest this year, in that the competition was for (ahem) Erotic Fiction.

I should now warn younger viewers that the remainder of this piece is ever-so-slightly NSFW.

Well, that scared you off, didn’t it? Ha.

As I was saying, a CV is a CV, and in any case it also seemed a good opportunity to try out one’s skills in this particular area before making a dreadful faux pas and becoming eligible for a bad sex award. However, I’ve never written anything remotely approaching a sex scene before, so writing something with the primary purpose of being erotic was something of a challenge, and I resolved not to do anything about it unless a neat plot idea presented itself.

Unfortunately, one did.

Anyway, the story turned out to be quite straightforward to write, although I was actually cringing with embarrassment as I did so (how British is that?) It had quite a neat plot twist, and (for some reason I was quite inordinately pleased about this) an act of fellatio that was entirely integral to the plot. The most difficult aspect was the naming of the parts. There seem to be roughly four alternative approaches to this, all of which sound equally ridiculous in a serious piece of writing, viz.:

1) (anatomical) penis

2) (american) dick

3) (anglo-saxon) cock

4) (literary) member

In the end, I used one cock, one member and one (God help me) “wetness” (the latter being, of course, for the lady bits). I believe that I also used the adjectives “throbbing”, “erect” and (curiously) “re-erect”.

I sent the thing off without showing it to another soul, not sure whether to hope for a win or for it to be buried forever. In the event, however, like a considerate lover, it came second. So one more for the CV, then. However, given that the current work in progress is a children’s novel, I need to be just ever-so-slightly careful how I use it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Competitions and festivals, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.